TRA & ART: Poetics of Machine Learning

In tandem with the public lecture and discussion Gonzalo Reyes Araos will premiere an exhibition of new work at galerie PLUTO on view through summer 2025, “I remember correctly you are you and the rest is history.” Many of the theoretical concepts presented in the exhibition stem from Reyes Araos’ 2024-2025 discourse with University of Bonn experts in artificial intelligence, psychology, linguistics, media studies, and art history.

Expert: Gonzalo Reyes Araos, Artist-in-residence at galerie PLUTO

In so-called ‚High Modernism‘ after WWII the notion of ‚medium‘ was central. The idea was that art should be a critical analysis of its underlying medium. Although this approach, connected especially to the name of Clement Greenberg, was seen as inadequate since the 1960s – the question of the medium and its critical analysis in art still haunts us, especially since ever new media technologies appear in our society. The dernier cri of media evolution is so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, mostly meaning machine learning and its ability to detect and, lately, to generate patterns. How does art react to this new medium? Some historical, theoretical and aesthetical musings will be the topic of my talk.

Expert: Prof. Dr. Jens Schröter (Media Culture Studies)

Our contribution will focus on different linguistic issues dealing with the impact of AI on language and communication. We will address, among others, the following questions: How do globalization and technology influence the diversity and the future of languages? What is the impact of the English bias often attributed to Large Language Models? Are words capable of generating reality?

Expert: Prof. Dr. Anke Grutschus (Romance Philology / French and Spanish Linguistics)

Let's dive into the behind the scenes of AI models: their language production mechanisms, the patterns they follow, and the reactions they elicit from recipients. Is there still room for creativity? This contribution examines how generative AI is reshaping our understanding of originality, innovation, and intellectual property in the creative domain.

Expert: Iris Ferrazzo (Computational Linguistics)

Target, ban, team, threat, mirror - even a seemingly random string of words can affect the right observer, because the poet has created them with purpose. But what happens when this creation is left to a machine without consciousness or intention? How can we still feel something? Dr Merlin Monzel explores this question in his lecture 'Pareidolia and Poetry: A Perspective from Psychology’. Pareidolia describes the tendency to project meaning into structures that are actually meaningless, something that happens all the time in human communication. Is art also a form of pareidolia? And what role does imagination play? Let's find out in this excursion into the science of phantasia and a-phantasia.

Expert: Dr. Merlin Monzel (Psychology)

Does the fusion of art and artificial intelligence spell the end of human-made autonomous art and artists? Does it herald the dawn of a new computer-driven era of post-anthropocentric AlgoNet art, in which creativity is fed by artificial neural networks? The contribution deals with the difficult renegotiation of the relationship between human artists, machines and intelligent cultural technology, while focusing on the artistic creation topos of dreaming and hallucinating machines and their imaginary potential. 

Expert: Prof. Dr. Birgit Mersmann (Contemporary Art and Digital Images Cultures)